Re: [rdiff-backup-users] will rdiff-backup work if no single backup session is long enough to finish?

[Hunter Matthews]

On Sun, 2005-08-07 at 22:51, Ben Escoto wrote:
> >>>>> Adam Megacz <address@hidden>
> >>>>> wrote the following on Sun, 07 Aug 2005 13:54:07 -0700
> 
> > The partition I'm backing up is really big and consists of oodles of
> > tiny files.  I really liked the fact that rsync was still useful
> > even when I'm rarely connected to the network in a single place long
> > enough to run a full backup (ie open() every file) -- by checking
> > timestamps rsync can get useful work done even if I only run it for
> > 10-15 minutes at a time, and if I run it often enough, my backup
> > still occasionally reaches parity with the source.  Most of my
> > backup sessions end up getting killed (ctrl-c) because I need to
> > disconnect my laptop.  Only a few run to completion.

> 
> Hi rdiff-backup is more session-based than rsync so the behavior
> you're describing is normal.  There's no way to get it to work like
> rsync, where it doesn't care whether or not a session succeeds or
> fails.
> 
> Perhaps you could backup nightly---run a script that backs up your
> data then turns the laptop off?  If not it seems rdiff-backup is
> inappropriate for your needs.

I'm responsible for a number of laptop backups here (and to add to the
general mayhem they're osx machines) and basically:

a) backing up laptops correctly is HARD
b) you will have to modify your laptop behavior a little.

I have a wrapper around rdiff-backup here that:
a) runs in cron every hour
b) 'pings' the laptop 
c) if it was pingable, AND the last backup is > 23 hours old
d) attempts the backup.

Most of our laptops can be backed up in ~20-30 minutes. If many of your
"sessions" on the network are short, switch to a "user initiated" backup
where the user directly says "I'm gonna be here for a while, back me
up."

I may do that for one particular faculty member here.


[For bonus points, these laptops are DHCP, so I needed the nss-mdns
module on the backup server to be able to find them based on their
'foo.local' address]

-- 
Hunter Matthews                          Unix / Network Administrator
Office: BioScience 145/244               Duke Univ. Biology Department
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Never take candy from strangers. Especially on the internet.